2013/05/04

Noam Chomsky: The Boston Bombings Gave Americans a Taste,

of the Terrorism the US Inflicts abroad every day. April is usually a cheerful month in New England, with the first signs of spring, and the harsh winter at last receding. Not this year. There are a few in Boston, who were not touched in some way by the marathon bombings on April 15, and the tense week that followed. Several friends of mine were at the finish line when the bombs went off. Others live close to where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the second suspect, was captured. The young police officer Sean Collier, was murdered right outside my office building. It's rare for privileged Westerners to see graphically, what many others experience daily, for example, in a remote village in Yemen, the same week as the marathon bombings. On April 23, Yemeni activist and journalist Farea Al Muslami,who had studied at an American high school, testified before a US Senate committee, that right after the marathon bombings, a drone strike in his home village in Yemen killed its target. The strike terrorized the villagers, turning them into enemies of the United States, something that years of jihadi propaganda had failed to accomplish. His neighbors had admired the US, Al Muslimi told the committee, but Now, however. when they think of America, they think of the fear they feel at the drones over their heads. What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant. Rack up another triumph for President Obama's global assassination program, which creates hatred of the United States, and threats to its citizens more rapidly than it kills people who are suspected of posing a possible danger to us someday. The target of the Yemeni village assassination, which was carried out to induce maximum terror in the population, was well known, and could easily have been apprehended Al Muslimi said. This is another familiar feature of the global terror operations. There was no direct way to prevent the Boston murders. There are some easy ways to prevent likely future ones, by not inciting them. That's also true of another case of a suspect murdered, his body disposed of without autopsy, when he could easily have been apprehended and brought to trial: Osama bin Laden. This murder too had consequences. To locate bin Laden, the CIA launched a fraudulent vaccination campaign in a poor neighborhood, then switched it, uncompleted, to a richer area, where the suspect was thought to be. The CIA operation violated fundamental principles, as old as the Hippocratic oath. It also endangered health workers, associated with a polio vaccination program in Pakistan, several of whom were abducted ad killed, prompting the UN to withdraw its anti polio team.